If You Stayed At A Starwood Hotel (Marriott), Follow The Steps To Secure Your Data

Marriott,  the worlds largest hotel chain disclosed that hackers took away 500 million guest account information. The breach seem to have happened at one of the recently acquired hotel chain, Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide.
Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide was acquired by Marriott International for $13 billion in 2016. The brand includes St. Regis, Sheraton Hotels & Resorts, W Hotels, Westin Hotels & Resorts, Aloft Hotels, Tribute Portfolio, Element Hotels, Le Méridien Hotels & Resorts, The Luxury Collection, Four Points by Sheraton and Design Hotels.
The data breach has started in 2014 after an "unauthorized party" managed to gain unauthorized access to the Starwood's guest reservation database, and had copied and encrypted the information.

On September 8, 2018, Marriott alerted by a security system Marriott learned about the breach and during the subsequent investigation they discovered that there had been unauthorized access to the Starwood network since 2014.  The company recently discovered that an unauthorized party had copied and encrypted information, and took steps towards removing it.  On November 19, 2018, Marriott was able to decrypt the information and determined that the contents were from the Starwood guest reservation database.
“We deeply regret this incident happened, We fell short of what our guests deserve and what we expect of ourselves.  We are doing everything we can to support our guests, and using lessons learned to be better moving forward.” said Arne Sorenson, Marriott’s President and Chief Executive Officer.

Marriott has further information for the  guests;

Guest Support
Marriott has taken the following steps to help guests monitor and protect their information:
Dedicated Website and Call Center
We have established a dedicated website (info.starwoodhotels.com) and call center to answer questions you may have about this incident. The frequently-asked questions on info.starwoodhotels.com may be supplemented from time to time.  The call center is open seven days a week and is available in multiple languages.  Call volume may be high, and we appreciate your patience.
Email Notification
Marriott will begin sending emails on a rolling basis starting today, November 30, 2018, to affected guests whose email addresses are in the Starwood guest reservation database.
Free WebWatcher Enrollment
Marriott is providing guests the opportunity to enroll in WebWatcher free of charge for one year. WebWatcher monitors internet sites where personal information is shared and generates an alert to the consumer if evidence of the consumer’s personal information is found.  Due to regulatory and other reasons, WebWatcher or similar products are not available in all countries.  Guests from the United States who activate WebWatcher will also be provided fraud consultation services and reimbursement coverage for free.  To activate WebWatcher, go to info.starwoodhotels.com and click on your country, if listed, for enrollment.
Marriott is furnishing a Form 8-K with the SEC attaching a copy of this press release and presenting certain other information with respect to the incident.

The Hunt for 3ve and Methbot, Killing Off a Major AD Fraud Operation Through Industry Collaboration

Republished from MyAdlets, and from the FOREWORD section of a very comprehensive White paper.
Two global botnets, Methbot and 3ve have completely been shutdown and the culprits have been identified. Of the two botnets, the Methbot was shutdown in December 2016. 3ve, pronounced Eve was shutdown by the recent operations.
In addition to FBI, Google and WhiteOps, there were many other companies from the industry that assisted the killing off of the botnets. The industry working group included Adobe, Amazon Advertising, CenturyLink,ESET, Facebook, Fox-IT, F-Secure, Matt Carothers, McAfee, Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit, Oath, Symantec, The Shadowserver Foundation, The Trade Desk, Trend Micro, and others. Following is the Foreword section;

Every year brings new levels of sophistication and innovation in cybercrime, and the last year was no exception.Over the course of last year, we investigated one of the most complex and sophisticated ad fraud operations we have seen to date. We named this operation “3ve” (pronounced “Eve”), and we’re sharing what we’ve learned from our investigation into its activity with the broader community to promote collaboration in the ongoing fight against cybercrime. These efforts demonstrate how effective cooperation and collaboration across the digital advertising industry can be in curbing ad fraud.

3ve operated on a massive scale: at its peak, it controlled over 1 million IPs from both residential botnet infections and corporate IP spaces, primarily in North America and Europe (for comparison, this is more than the number of broadband subscriptions in Ireland). It featured several unique sub-operations, each of which constituted a sophisticated ad fraud scheme in its own right. Shortly after we began to identify the massive infrastructure (comprised of thousands of servers across many data centers) used to host 3ve’s operation, we found similar activity happening within a network of malware-infected residential computers. These diversified tactics and siloed operations made 3ve’s operators harder to identify than previous operations we’d encountered, and also allowed the larger fraud enterprise to continue when one aspect of it was disrupted. Through its varied and complex machinery, 3ve generated billions of fraudulent ad bid requests (i.e., ad spaces on web pages that advertisers can bid to purchase in an automated way).
3ve’s size and tactics are considerable for an ad fraud operation, but the fact that fraudsters dedicate their time and effort to developing complex ad fraud schemes is hardly a surprise. Ad fraud has been an attractive cybercrime due to its lucrative returns and relatively low risk. The primary risk for most fraudsters has been having their operation discovered and shut down. While that can cost fraudsters thousands – and sometimes millions – of dollars in illicit profits, the prospect of purely financial losses has not effectively deterred fraudsters from simply starting another operation.
Today marks the culmination of a collaborative effort that enabled us to more thoroughly confront and dismantle 3ve. We referred our findings to law enforcement, and today the U.S. Department of Justice announced criminal charges tied to 3ve’s operations. What followed was a collaborative and coordinated effort by both law enforcement and various companies across industries, including ad tech, cyber security, and Internet service providers, to disable the infrastructure and sinkhole
botnet command and control servers. The result so far has rendered the operation’s botnets unable to continue to drive fraudulent ad traffic. Protecting the many targets – including our customers – of an operation like 3ve in the context of a multi-stakeholder working group required patience, dedication, diligence, and endurance. Our core objectives were to detect and prevent this fraud on behalf of our customers and Internet users, and to cut this operation off from its sources of profit.
While ad fraud continues to represent a challenge to the advertising industry, the action taken today demonstrates that it is a risky activity with potentially serious consequences for fraudsters. And our efforts won’t stop here — we’re confident that the industry-wide movement to protect the integrity of the digital advertising economy will continue on. 

Matica Launches chromXpert, A New Consumables Program at TRUSTECH 2018

Analog - Guardocs

MUNICH, Germany, 14 November, 2018 – Matica Technologies AG will release a new consumables program, ‘chromXpert’, at TRUSTECH 2018, the global exhibition that brings together the world’s secure technologies and applications.
The new program, chromXpert, will launch by releasing several new ribbons, which will broaden the number of options available for the desktop Matica printers. All of Matica’s original ribbons continue to be offered under the chromXpert program and are compatible with the direct-to-card and retransfer EDIsecure® XID series of printers.

All Matica Genuine Consumables have been grouped under a new premium ribbon program, chromXpert,  which has been designed to produce the very best image quality with Matica card printing systems.

chromXpert ribbons provide high-quality printing and ease of use. Each printer automatically recognizes the ribbon type and knows exactly how to use it in the most optimized way. Genuine Matica Ribbons provide status checks of the remaining ribbon and automatically alert when the ribbon is running low.

Analog - Guardocs

FreeBSD 12.0-RC2 Available for Download

 
One of our favorite tools, FreeBSD has released RC 2 of the FreeBSD 12.0
25 November: The second RC build for the FreeBSD 12.0 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, armv6, armv7, arm64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, powerpcspe and sparc64 architectures are available on most of our FreeBSD mirror sites.

A Major Ducument Dump May Mean Losing Massive Sets of Federal Scientific and Historical Data.

The Department of the Interior (DOI), is seeking “permission to destroy records about oil and gas leases, mining, dams, wells, timber sales, marine conservation, fishing, endangered species, non-endangered species, critical habitats, land acquisition, and lots more from the National Archives.
The DOI plan to destroy potentially millions of documents dating back 50 years. Approval for the plan rests with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).
Read a comprehensive report here. The original reporter